SOMEHOW THE CLEAR BLUE sky visible through the unglassed windows only made the interior of the Toothtalker’s room look shabbier. The Toothtalker herself, it occurred to Rivas, looked like just one more piece of faintly morbid antique trash to avoid tripping over. The thought made him smile in spite of his headache. Yes, he thought, among all these pictures and specimen jars and rotted books and bits of incomprehensible old-time machinery, she looks like a desiccated old mummy. The lower jaw, perhaps due to some error in taxidermie technique, had gradually pulled away from the face as the unwholesome memento dried out, finally leaving the effigy frozen forever in a stressful but inaudible scream.
A mummy which, he added as once again she treated her guests to some of the eerie low gargling she was so good at, has become inhabited by baritone mice. In spite of being irritable and grainy-eyed from a nearly sleepless night, Rivas had to strangle a chuckle. The effort made his headache worse.
He glanced at the chair beside him and saw that Irwin Barrows was sitting hunched forward, anxiously watching the motionless, gargling old woman. Rivas was surprised—he had thought that Barrows’s insistence that they consult a Toothtalker before Rivas embarked on the redemption was nothing more than a formality, a traditional gesture like letting a wagon “warm up” for a few minutes on cold mornings before flicking the reins and getting started… but the old financier was obviously as credulous as the stupidest scavenger who ever shambled up these tower stairs to hear the judgment of the spirit world on which beyond-the-wall districts were particularly favored or imperiled by the configurations of the stars.
Rivas felt almost betrayed to realize it. Come on, he thought, you’re one of the wealthiest men in Ellay, surely you can see through this nonsense if I can.
He leaned back and looked out the window at the sunlit but still damp landscape. To the west he could see a green band that was the edge of the south farms, but to the south was nothing but the spread of tumbled, empty buildings, a scene lost somewhere between city scape and landscape, animated by rolling tumble weeds and, once in a while, the ragged figure of a scavenger too weak to venture very far from the city walls. Further to the south he could see the gleam of San Pedro Harbor. And beyond that, he knew, was Long Beach Island and then the open sea, and, way down the coast at the mouth of the Santa Ana River, Irvine.
I hope I can catch her, he thought, before having to travel too far in that direction. He shuddered, remembering one redemption—one that had not succeeded—that actually brought him within sight of the high white walls of Jaybush’s Holy City at Irvine. I never, he thought firmly, want to be that close to that damned place again. It wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t more than half suspect he is some kind of messiah. My father used to swear he’d seen the spray of shooting stars that lit the sky on the night of Jaybush’s conception, thirty-some years ago—and even rival religions admit that before he retired from public life he several times did, verifiably, bring dead people back to life… though of course the rival religions claim he had Satan’s help.
A patch of morning sunlight had been inching its way across the wall, and when Rivas glanced again at the old woman in the corner, he saw that the light had reached her face, and, in her gaping mouth, was glittering on all the bits of metal glued to her teeth. Well, Barrows can’t say he isn’t getting his money’s worth, he thought. There must be half a pound of scrap metal in there. Rivas knew—as Barrows evidently didn’t—that this was just a gaudy prop, that real toothtalking was supposed to be a consequence of having tiny metal fillings in the teeth. In years past a few people with such fillings had reported hearing faint voices in their mouths; but they said it happened very seldom and only on mountain tops, and Rivas hadn’t heard of a verified case of it showing up within at least the last ten years.
It was, though, a priceless piece of popular superstition for fortunetellers to exploit.
Rivas yawned audibly—so that for a moment he and the old woman seemed to be yawning in tandem—but he closed his mouth with a snap when Barrows darted an angry glance at him, and he had to make do with just arranging himself more comfortably in his chair. He’d given up trying to sleep last night after a dream about Urania had sent him jack-knifing out of bed just as the one o’clock bell was being rung. He’d spent the remainder of the night on the roof of his building with his pelican, sawing and strumming increasingly fantastic gun improvisations on the tune of Peter and the Wolf.
Perhaps because Rivas seemed unimpressed with her routine thus far, the old Toothtalker let her jaw relax and hurried to a closet from which, after knocking a few things over, she produced a yellow plastic telephone with a receiver which began buzzing and clicking after she gave it a couple of shakes. She frowned reprovingly at Rivas as she began whispering into it.
For a few minutes he tried to pay attention, if only to figure out what she was saying about him to the spirit world, but the interrupted dream from last night seemed to cling to him like a faint, disagreeable odor, ignorable most of the time but intruding itself whenever he shifted position. Finally he sighed and gave in, and let the recollection take him.
In the dream Urania had been one of a row of people kneeling in a typical Jaybird nest, a cramped room out in the ruins somewhere, littered with the sort of relics that aren’t worthy anybody’s time to scavenge. The priest—known as the jaybush, for during administration of the sacrament he was supposed to become an actual, literal extension of the Messiah, Norton Jaybush himself—moved down the line, pausing in front of each communicant just long enough to touch him or her on the forehead.
Every one of the kneeling figures at least jerked at the touch, and many pitched over in violent fits. Rivas still remembered very clearly his own first receiving of the sacrament—remembered watching the jaybush work his way down the line toward him, and wondering how much of the gaffed-fish response was just hysteria or outright faking; and then the jaybush had come to him, and touched his forehead, and the rending physical shock of it had blacked him out, leaving him to wake up on the floor, dazed and bruised and stupefied, half an hour later.
In the dream, when the jaybush came to Urania and touched her, she had raspingly exhaled a cloud of pink vapor, and then had steadily kept on exhaling more of it, long after her lungs should have been wrung completely empty, and when Rivas rushed up in concern and took her in his arms he could feel her flesh diminishing inside her clothes like an outgoing tide; for a long time he cradled the still impossibly exhaling and ever-lighter girl, and when the emptying finally stopped and he raised his head from her shoulder and looked down into her face, it was nothing more than a naked skull that gaped blindly up at him.
And, he recalled now with something like nausea, that discovery had not in any way altered his determination to bring her back to Ellay and make her his wife. He rubbed his eyes and pushed a stray lock of hair back into place.
“Ah,” the old woman said, nodding and pacing back and forth with the telephone receiver pressed to her ear. “Neutrons, you say? Goddamn. And…master cylinders? Lord have mercy.” She squinted down her nose at Rivas to see if he was properly impressed by these esoteric terms. He noticed that she hadn’t bothered to connect the end of the telephone cord to anything, and it was dragging around on the floor behind her. He wondered whether she’d trip over it. “Ten-four,” she said finally, and then put the telephone down on the window sill, apparently to cool off.
She turned to her guests. “Well, the spirits had a lot to say. You, sir,” she said, pointing at Rivas, “are the focus of a lot of uncertainty. You see, in every equation there’s an unknown factor—the hex, as we mathematicians say—and in order to untangle the various lifelines involved and see which one comes out healthy at the end, it’s necessary to…”
She went into a long speech then, full of “identity resonances” and “orbital velocities of the soul,” frequently waving toward her dust-covered and obviously random collection of shabby books to support her statements. Presently she dug out a deck of playing cards and, while shuffling them, explained that Matt Sandoval, Ellay’s legendary First Ace, had designed the fifty-two cards on his deathbed as a means for mystically savvy people to be able to consult him even after his demise. The four “aces,” she informed her guests, were called that because they represented the four natures of the Ace himself; She then began laying the cards out on a tabletop in a significant-looking pattern, scowling or nodding as each card was added.
Rivas stopped paying attention. During the last several years he had laboriously learned to read the old-time writing, with all its silent letters, superfluous tenses and fabulous, credulity-straining words; and he’d actually read a number of the books and magazines that were just decorations in the more affluent households, and props for fortunetellers. And though he had arrived at no very clear understanding of the bright, crowded, “electrical” world of more than a century ago—even their maps described a southern California coastline that didn’t exist—he’d gleaned enough to know that most people who made their livings by claiming to know about the ancient wonders actually knew less about them than he did.
Her story about Sandoval having invented playing cards, for example, and naming the aces after his own title, was, Rivas knew, exactly backward. Rivas had read a journal kept during the First Ace’s reign, and had learned that the citizens of Ellay had wanted to confer the title of king upon the man who had founded the currency, had the wall built, broken the terror hold of the piratical “motorcyclists” known as the hooters, and re-instituted agriculture. Sandoval had accepted the job but not the title. “There’ve been too many kings,” he was reported to have said; “and Queen or Jack or Joker won’t do—I’ll be the first Ace.”
The old woman seemed to be winding down anyway. “I see success for you both,” she said. “The spirits say you’re cookin’ with gas. For you, man,” she went on, pointing at Barrows, “I see an increase in your fortune, I see those old brandy bottles just a-rolling toward you.”
Rivas looked over at Barrows. Yes, the chance of mention of brandy had firmly set the Toothtalker’s hook—the old man’s eyes were wide and his knuckles were white on the arms of the chair.
“And for you,” she continued, now pointing at Rivas and eyeing his bare wedding ring finger, “I see… a reunion with a long-lost lover, a wedding and… six unsporting children.”
Rivas blinked. You old phony, he thought in instant panic, don’t say that, he believes your idiot predictions! The musician glanced apprehensively at the old man and, sure enough, Barrows was staring at him coldly and nodding.
“I wondered how great the risk of that would be,” Barrows murmured.
Rivas abruptly decided that he’d go after Urania unpaid and independently if he had to—but leaving to perform a redemption right now would almost certainly cost him his job, and Barrow’s payment would mean the difference between a leisurely, well-fed year or two in which to court another position on the one hand, and poverty and bad food and the selling off of possessions and hasty, undignified begging for any sort of job on the other. And if at all possible he wanted to prevent Barrows from hiring some other redemptionist who’d certainly only manage to muddy the water and put the Jaybirds on their guard.
“Look,” he said evenly, “this old lady’s a fraud, and no more able to tell the future than I am. Now just because she—”
“Don’t try to claim that, Rivas,” rasped Barrows. “After she knew—”
“She just said you’d get a lot of money! That’s a standard fortuneteller’s line, dammit, same as the one she gave me! She didn’t know you’re the guy that distills it.”
The Toothtalker, disconcerted that so innocuous a prediction had caused such rancor, had been listening closely, and her eyebrows went up at Rivas’s last sentence. “Yes I did,” she said instantly. “The vibratory dimensions told me everything. Greg Rivas and Irwin Barrows, you two are.”
Smothering a curse, Rivas sprang out of his chair, crossed to the window and picked up the telephone receiver, which had quieted down but began buzzing again when he jiggled it. “Damn it,” he shouted at Barrows, “none of this is real. Look.” He unscrewed the perforated plastic cap on the earpiece and a large wasp flew out; it looped a confused figure-eight in front of his eyes and then lighted on his cheek and stung him. “Ow, goddammit.”
“You see?” cried the Toothtalker triumphantly. “You can’t mess with scientifical machinery with impunity!” The wasp found the window and disappeared outside. “Look, you made me lose my… high frequency receptor.”
Rivas saw that Barrows, who evidently didn’t know how telephones were supposed to have worked, was even more impressed with the Toothtalker’s powers now than he’d been a minute ago. “Holy smokes,” the old man exclaimed, “Rivas isn’t going to die, is he?”
Rivas started to say, scathingly, “Of a wasp sting?” but the old woman, with the reflexes of a veteran entertainer used to quelling troublesome audiences, whipped a squirt gun out from under her robe and squeezed off a blast of raw high-proof gin straight into his face; Rivas squawked, reeled blindly to the window and hung on the sill, gasping and spitting.
“He would have,” she said serenely, “if I hadn’t given him that. Radio liquor, distilled from isotopes. He’s lucky I had some handy—that was no ordinary wasp.”
Feeling defeated, Rivas straightened up, took a deep breath and turned around to face Barrows. “Listen to me,” he said. “I’ll promise to bring her back to your house—assuming I can get her away from the Jaybirds—if you’ll promise to let her go with me if she understands what she’d be doing… and if she should happen to want to, after all these years. How’s that? We’ll leave it up to Uri to decide whether this lady’s prediction was accurate.” Barrows started to speak, but Rivas interrupted him by taking a firmer grip on the telephone receiver, which he somehow hadn’t let go of, and slamming it very hard against the concrete window sill. The receiver exploded, and bits of yellow plastic buzzed through the air and clattered around among the piles of incomprehensible old junk. “And of course,” Rivas went on, “keep in mind the fact that I’m the only redemptionist with any real chance of getting her at all.”
Barrows squinted at him for several seconds, and Rivas was a little surprised to see that the old man actually looked uncertain and even a little sick—as if the price of this redemption had begun to involve something more than his Currency.
“You make it hard on both of us,” Barrows said softly.
Rivas wasn’t sure he knew what the old man meant, but he said, “I’m just divvying up the weight.” He crossed to where Barrows was sitting and stuck out his right hand. “Promise?”
Barrows sighed. “I truly hope she doesn’t decide to join you. Yes, I promise.” He reached up and with the slow emphasis of a weary judge rapping a gavel, shook Rivas’s hand.
Few of his sophisticated friends would have recognized the lost-looking fellow standing in the rain-puddled square by the South Gate as Gregorio Rivas; he had spent the hour since leaving the Toothtalker’s parlor at a tailor’s and a barber shop. Now, looking years younger with his half beard shaved off and his hair pulled back and funneled into a tarred stump at the back of his neck and his wild clothes replaced by a neat suit of off white flax, he was the very picture of a well-born youth bewildered at finding himself alone, jiggerless and hungover in the nastier end of the big city.
He wasn’t the only person loitering there. In general parlance the South Gate consisted of the area immediately roundabout as well as the actual gate through which Sandoval Street entered the walled city, and it was perhaps the busiest and most crowded fifty square yards in southern California. At the moment Ellay’s most successful lumber scavenger was bringing several wagons into the city, each one piled high with wooden beams, most of them gray and caked with concrete but a few still bright with ancient paint. The musty smell of freshly resurrected lumber contended in the morning air with the aroma of the hot tacos being sold on several street corners, the stench from Dogtown every time the wind faltered, and the smoky pungency of the charcoal and lye guilds out on eastern Woolshirt; and the big old buildings on the west side of Sandoval echoed back the cacophony of daily life among the barrows and gullies and shacks on the other side. Rivas’s aching head was assaulted with an auctioneer’s jabbering from the big wooden warehouse that was the Relic Exchange, the ringing of hammers in the various blacksmith booths, and even, he half suspected, the clink, clank and curse of the steel miners under the streets, struggling to free and bring up pieces of the vast steel beams that lay tumbled and rusting under the fine soil of the whole eastern half of Ellay. And there was even, Rivas noted with a wry grin, a street balladeer playing a pelican and ineptly singing “Everybody Wants to Smoke My Comoy.” Rivas rubbed his smooth chin and wondered if he wasn’t leaving more of himself in the city than he was taking with him.
And because the little white cards that represented brandy changed hands so frequently in this quarter, much of the crowd consisted of scavengers of a less respectable sort than the lumber merchant and the miners. Though continuing to behave like a scared young man in unfamiliar surroundings, Rivas watched with concealed amusement the specialized dance of an expert pickpocket—strangely insectlike in its series of hesitant touches culminating in a darting garb, the whole body spring-poised for the possible necessity of flight—and the indolent progress of a somewhat overripe prostitute who had come to terms with the consequences of time and knew how to make the most of shadows and selectively revealing clothes. It occurred to Rivas that he was, at the moment, just as much a web-spinner, just as much a patient angler, as either of them.
The difference between us, he thought as he hefted his knapsack and wandered in an aimless fashion to a different corner, is that I’m fishing for predators.
During the next fifteen minutes he saw, too, a number of people who were genuinely in the sort of plight he was mimicking. Hunched down in a doorway near where he’d been standing before, Rivas noticed an obviously malnourished, no more than teenaged boy muttering angrily to several imaginary companions, and Rivas wondered what it was that had brought the boy to this state. Liquor or syphilis generally took decades to ruin a person’s mind, but dope could have—especially the Venetian Blood—or the Jaybird sacrament, though the Jaybirds nearly never let strangers see any of their very badly eroded communicants.
There was a drunken girl stumbling around, too, who seemed at first to be with the inexpert pelican player but was eventually led away by a grinning baldy-sport who, Rivas happened to know, was a Blood dealer. What’s the matter, thought Rivas sourly, the dope trade so bad you’ve got to pimp in your spare time? I’d go rescue her if I wasn’t certain she’d drift right back here to one of you.
Some people, he thought, simply have no will to survive—they’re walking hors d’oeuvres waiting for someone who can spare the time to devour them. And while it’s probably some such unattractive quality as egotism or vanity that has kept me clear of… that catastrophic relaxation, it’s the reason I’m still alive and able to think, and I’ll work on keeping it.
Rivas smiled, remembering his response to his first taking of the Jaybird sacrament—while the rest of the recovering communicants had been praising the Lord Jaybush and making sure they knew when the sacrament would be administered again so as not to miss it, young Gregorio Rivas, though stunned, exhausted and glad to have found shelter and company, was coldly appraising the situation. He didn’t doubt that the mysterious Norton Jaybush was certainly more than a man and possibly a god, but the prospect of abandoning his individuality in order to “merge with the Lord” was profoundly repugnant to him.
The Jaybird band that picked him up had taken him to a nest in one of the neglected structures outside the wall and introduced him to the Jaybird way of life. He had, that first day, watched several of the far-gone communicants “speaking in tongues,” and he was disturbed not so much by the gibberish pouring out of the slack faces as by the fact that they were all doing it in precise, effortless unison, as if—and Rivas still recalled the image that had occurred to him then—as if each of them was just one visible loop of a vast, vibrating worm. Rivas had had no wish to graft himself on, and soon discovered that an alcohol-dulled mind was inaccessible to the sacrament. Thereafter, despite the Messiah’s ban on liquor, he had been careful to take the sacrament only when he was, unobtrusively, drunk. This let him parry the alertness-blunting effects of the damaging communion… though it wasn’t until he got the idea of incorporating his musical skills into the Jaybird services that he found himself able, if only furtively, to riposte.
And then, when he’d finally left the Jaybirds and drifted northwest to Venice, there had been Blood.
Venice was a savage carnival of a town that had sprung up like crystals in a saturate solution around the semicircular bay known as the Ellay-Ex Deep, in the center of which was a submarine pit that was reputed to glow with fantastic rainbow colors on some nights. A person who had a lot of money and could take care of himself could sample some amazing pleasures, it was said, in the rooms above the waterfront and canalside bars—Rivas had heard stories of “snuff galleries” where one could strangle to death people who were actually volunteers, frequently but not always goaded to this course by the money that would subsequently be paid to their families; of “sporting establishments,” brothels whose inmates were all physically deformed in erotically accommodating ways; of sport-seafood restaurants, whose long-time patrons eventually could be conveyed inside only with some difficulty, being blind, decomposing and confined to wheeled aquariums… but eager for just one more deadly, fabulously expensive meal; and of course he’d heard whispers about the quintessential nightclub of the damned, the place about which no two stories were consistent but all attributed to it a horrible, poisonous glamor, the establishment known as Deviant’s Palace.
As a jiggerless young vagrant, Rivas was in no position even to verify the existence of such fabulous places, and even a tortilla with some beans rolled up in it was the price of a day’s hard labor—but Blood was cheap.
The drug was a reddish brown powder that could be snorted, brewed, smoked or eaten, and it sucked the user into a semicomatose state, comfortingly bathed by the triple illusion of great deeds done, time to rest, and warmth; longtime users claimed to feel also a vast, loving attention, as if it was God himself rocking the cradle.
In Venice it was daringly fashionable to sample Blood, perhaps because the genuine Blood freaks were such an unattractive crew. Many of them simply starved to death, unwilling to buy food with money that could be used to get more of the drug, and none of them ate much, or bathed, or shambled any farther than to the next person that could be wheedled out of a jigger or two, and then back to the Blood shop.
After Rivas found himself a steady job washing dishes in one of the many restaurants and got a little money, he wandered one evening into a narrow little Blood shop beside one of the canals, curious about the drug because in Ellay it was illegal and expensive. The man who ran the shop was a user himself, and delivered such a glowing panegyric in praise of the stuff that Rivas fled, sensing that this all-reconciling drug would rob him of his carefully constructed vanity, his painful memories of Urania, his budding musical ambitions… in short, everything that made him Gregorio Rivas.
“Beautiful morning, isn’t it?”
Rivas jumped realistically and looked with wary hope at the man who’d paused beside him. Though not as tall as Rivas, he was a good deal stockier, and except for his nose and his eyes his whole face was hidden by a hat and a bushy copper beard.
“Uh, yeah,” said Rivas in a nervous tone as he shifted his knapsack to a more comfortable position on his shoulders. “Kind of cold, though.”
“Yeah, it is.” The man yawned and leaned against the wall beside Rivas. “Waiting for someone?”
“Oh yes,” said Rivas quickly, “I—” He paused and then shrugged. “Well, no.”
The man chuckled. “I see. Listen, I’m on my way to get some food. You hungry?”
Rivas hoped that the quick gesture of touching his wallet looked spontaneous. “Uh, I guess not.”
“You sure? The place I’m thinking of will give us each a big plate of machaca con juevos, on the house, no charge.” He winked. “And I can get us a table right next to the fire.”
Rivas frowned. This was beginning to sound wrong. “Yeah? Where’s this?”
“Oh, it’s a little place on Spring, run by some friends of mine.” The man yawned again and stretched his arms over his head and then let them fall—one of them landed, and stayed, around Rivas’s shoulders.
Rivas’s mouth became a straight line. “Spring and what?”
“Huh? Oh, only a couple of blocks from here, Spring and Main. A five minute—”
“Right.” Rivas stepped out from under the man’s arm. “That would be the Boy’s Club. No thank you.” He strode off to find a different wall to lean on.
But the man came hurrying after him. “You know about the place, huh? Well, listen, lad, this is no time for false pride. Let me just—”
Rivas spun to face him, and he let the man see the knife he’d snatched from his right sleeve. “I can have it in your heart so fast you won’t have time to yell,” he remarked, not unkindly. “Vaya.”
“Jesus, kid,” the man exclaimed, stepping back, “okay!” Once out of range of the knife he permitted himself to amble away insouciantly, and he called back over his shoulder, “But you could have had a friend!”
I like the way, thought Rivas in almost honest puzzlement as he settled the knife back in its sleeve sheath and walked on, that every person in the world thinks his or her friendship is worth something. My God, if I really was a broke, hungry kid, I’d be a lot more chagrined at the loss of that breakfast.
Earlier Rivas had noticed a gang of young people crouched around a fire under a canted stone arch beside the Relic Exchange, and when he glanced in that direction now he saw that one of the girls was walking toward him, smiling, her hands in the pockets of her long, pavement-sweeping dress.
“Lost a friend, huh?” she asked when she was close enough to speak quietly and be heard.
“Oh.” Rivas waved Vaguely. “I didn’t know him. He just came over and started talking to me.”
“Are you hungry? Come and share our breakfast.”
Rivas’s heart was thumping, for he suspected this might be the baited hook he’d been looking for, but he made himself look wistful as he said, “Well, I don’t have any money….”
The girl put her hand on his shoulder and looked into his eyes. “Money is just the checkers in a game played by unhappy children,” she told him earnestly, and he turned away in case his sudden burst of feral satisfaction might show in his face—for he recognized her statement as one of the standard Jaybird come-along lines, unchanged since he’d first heard it on that lonely morning thirteen years ago. He’d later used it himself when out on recruiting expeditions.
“That may be true,” he said, reciting a response to it that he remembered as being easy to counter, “but you need money to live.”
“No,” she said gently, pulling him toward the leaning arch, “you’re exactly wrong. You need money to die. It’s love you need to live.”
He laughed with sophomoric bitterness. “That’s even harder to find.”
“Anything’s hard to find,” she told him, “if you don’t know where to look for it or what it is.”
This girl’s smooth, Rivas thought as he allowed himself to be led toward the group of Jaybirds, who were all looking up now and smiling at him; the grime around her neck and wrists has been there a while, and the dress has been slept in, but the figure’s adequate, she delivers her lines with fair sincerity, and, despite her teeth, that smile is as bright as a lamp in a window on a stormy night, and it’s the only thing a hungry stray would notice anyway.
The Jaybirds in the circle shifted to make room for Rivas, and he looked around sharply as he sat down on the damp dirt, but Urania wasn’t one of them. It seemed to be a typical band—mostly young people, their faces ranging in expression from the timid optimism of the new recruit through the sunny confidence of those who, like the girl that had snagged him, had been with the faith for a while, to the vacuous inattention of a couple of long time communicants, on whose faces the obligatory smile sat like a welcome mat in front of an abandoned house.
“This is a new friend of ours,” his guide told the group as she sat down next to him, “who’s been kind enough to accept our invitation to breakfast.”
There were quietly delighted exclamations, and from all sides Rivas was warmly assured that his arrival had brightened their day enormously. Rivas set about the task of responding as they would expect him to.
Abruptly he realized that he was shaking hands and grinning like an idiot spontaneously—for at least several seconds there he had not been acting. He felt a faint stirring of uneasiness—no, genuine fear—deep inside himself, for this had happened to him only twice before in his life, this warm, happy surrender of personality: once thirteen years ago when as a scared runaway he had first been approached by the Jaybirds, and then once only three years ago while performing his last redemption. He had finally located the girl he’d been hired to snatch, had finalized his plan for the escape late that evening, and had incautiously permitted himself the luxury of relaxing in the crowded Jaybird nest in the meantime. Both times it had been just a brief slip, and he’d only been vulnerable at all because of extreme fatigue—but what was his excuse this time?
“What’s the matter, brother?” A skinny Jaybird girl had noticed Rivas’s sudden chill and was leaning forward solicitously, stroking his cheek with one hand and, he noticed out of the corner of his eye, furtively twitching the other hand at her companions in the tighten-the-net signal. Instantly the gang closed around him, expressing concern and as if by accident blocking all the directions in which he might make a run for it.
Rivas looked around at them all and decided it was time to find out which one was the boss here. “I, uh, was just thinking,” he stammered, “I really should be trying to find a way to get back home; to my family.”
He knew this called for a strong block, and that he’d learn now who their leader was; and as he’d guessed, it was Sister Sue, the girl who’d found him, that now knelt in front of him and took his hands and, leaning almost close enough to kiss, stared hard into his eyes.
“Trust yourself,” she said to him in a low vibrant voice that seemed to resonate in his teeth. “You realized that they weren’t your real family, didn’t you, saw that there are qualities and depths in yourself that they can’t share or recognize? Questions they not only can’t answer, but can’t even understand? That is why you left them—no, don’t interrupt—think about it, and you’ll realize I’m right. I knew the moment I saw you that you had a real soul and that you were seeking the family that you can join totally. I don’t say trust me, or them, or anyone; I tell you that the only person you dare trust is yourself. And where did your need to find love lead you? To me. To us.”
Her eyes were glistening with tears, and the other Jaybirds, even the deteriorated ones, were nodding at him and humming deep in their throats, half of them on a very low note and half on a very high one, and the insidious two-toned buzz seemed to get right in behind his eyes and set all the contents of his brain vibrating into softened blurs.
It was hard to remember anything… nearly impossible to hold onto a thought for more than a few seconds… but he knew he didn’t need to anymore. The self-consciousness, the anxious policing of his personal boundaries, could at last be relaxed.
He felt tired—his knees didn’t seem to have their usual spring—but of course he hadn’t gotten much rest last night, and he didn’t have any reason to stand up anyway. He was among people he could trust.
He was aware of some inconsistencies between his memory and his perceptions—he remembered this Jaybird band as consisting of different people, and he thought he’d been sitting with them at a different corner, and the gray overcast he remembered seemed to be gone, and his clothes were somehow clean and pressed again, no longer caked with dust and dried blood—but his own personal memories and perceptions no longer seemed crucially important.
He smiled into the pair of eyes that seemed to fill the whole world, and he realized that he felt better already. The loss of Urania might have happened years ago for all the pain it caused him now, and even the aches and stiffnesses from the beating Barrows and his men had given him last night, after Urania’s birthday party, were gone.
“You’ve found your real family now, haven’t you?” Sister Sue asked softly.
If there was a part of his mind screaming in horrified denial, it was well buried. Rivas, totally at peace for the first time in many years, happily breathed the single word, “Yes.”
When the Jaybird band left the city at noon they took Rivas with them. One of the guards at the South Gate, a grayed veteran who had seen this sort of thing many times over the years, wearily walked out of the guard shack and extended his staff across their way to stop them.
“Alto,” he said. “Whoa.”
Sister Sue beamed at him. “Is there anything wrong, man?”
The guard nodded toward Rivas, who had bumped into, the man in front of him when the group stopped, but was smiling benevolently at everyone.
“Who’s the blurry boy?” the guard asked sternly.
“He’s one of us,” the girl said. “His name is Brother Boaz.”
“Is that right, son?” he asked more loudly. “Son? Jeez, one of you nudge him, will you? That’s got it. Listen to me, do you want to leave the city? You don’t have to.”
“I want to go where these people go,” Rivas explained.
“Where are they going?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s your name?”
“Uh… they told me, but I forget.”
“Well, that’s fine,” the guard said bitterly, letting his staff tip clack onto the flagstones. He looked at the girl. “And him still dressed respectable. You all sure didn’t waste any time on him, did you?”
“Some are more ready than others to give themselves to the Lord,” she told him serenely.
He opened his mouth for an angry retort, then apparently couldn’t think of one, for he just said, “Vaya,” and turned back to the guard shack.
“Vayamos,” Sister Sue replied, and led her band forward under the high arch of the gate and then across the cobbled wall road and down the gravel slope west toward the Harbor Freeway. The day being clear and sunny, a number of beribboned tents and booths had been set up in random patterns across the face of the slope like some kind of colorful mushrooms brought out by yesterday’s rain, and some of the vendors hooted at the group of pilgrims.
“Hey, señora,” yelled one fat old tentkeeper to Sister Sue, “let me give you a bath and a little lipstick and I swear to Jay bush you could knock down three fifths a day!”
The other vendors within earshot laughed, and the laughter doubled when one added, “A jigger at a time!”
Some of the newer Jaybirds looked embarrassed or angry as they plodded their winding course through this irreverent gauntlet, but the smiles on the faces of Sister Sue, Rivas, and the several deteriorated communicants never faltered.
One small time vice-caterer vaulted the counter of his booth and sprinted across the slope to Rivas and waved a piece of paper at him. It was a faded black-and-white photograph of a nude woman, a shabby example of the sort of relic that, bigger and more explicit and in color, could sell for cases of fifths in the fancy galleries in the city.
“You like that, eh?” cackled the merchant.
Rivas’s gaze crossed the picture and then returned to it, and for the first time in a couple of hours his eyes focused and his smile relaxed and was replaced by a frown.
“Oho, don’t like girls, eh?” said the merchant loudly, playing to the delighted audience. “I’ll bet this is what you like, am I right?” And he yanked out of his pocket a pint bottle of cheap Ventura gin and waved it alluringly.
Rivas stopped, and the man behind him bumped into him as Rivas hesitantly reached for the bottle. The attentive vendors roared, pounding on the counters of their booths and rolling on the ground.
“Not all the way birdy yet!” yelled the prancing merchant. He was tugging at the stopper when a hard slap knocked the bottle out of his hands; Sister Sue was in front of him now, leaning toward him, her smiling gaze so intense that the man actually squinted before it as though it were an intolerably bright light.
She whispered to him for a few seconds and then said, “We’ll be back for you, brother.”
She turned to Rivas and said softly, “Follow me, Brother Boaz.” He nodded, and fell into step when the band began moving forward between the now silent vendors, but Sister Sue kept looking back at him, for the tiny creases of frown hadn’t left his face.
The vice-caterer, who’d been wobbling ever since Sister Sue turned away from him, all at once sat down heavily on the gravel, and the ancient magazine clipping slipped from between his fingers and fluttered away across the slope.